Hennessey Venom GT : 1,244 bhp Supercar
When it comes to the high-end sports car market, all eyes are fixed on the European car manufacturing industry. Very rarely do we get another player from another continent—the Europeans, we can say, have nearly perfected the art and science of churning out jaw-droopingly beautiful and extremely fast cars.
Then again, the status quo is meant to be shaken every now and then, which is what we believe was the Texas-based car manufacturer Hennessey Performance had in mind.
Hennessey Performance has been in the industry for quite a while, and they built their name coaxing out unbelievable power from American muscle cars. Somebody from Hennessey must have thought that they can do the same for a hypercar. So they took a Lotus Exige, and bestowed upon it an impressive 1,244 bhp power output.
The result is the Hennessey Venom GT, which is built with a impressively modified Exige chassis; the doors, roof, windshield, cockpit, side glass, floorplan, head lamps, wipers, cockpit, and HVAC system are very much like the Lotus Exige’s, but the rest are modified to fit Hennessey Performance specifications. The Hennessey Venom GT boasts of a curb weight of 1,244 kilograms, thanks to the lightweight carbon fibre body that the engineering and design team fitted this supercar with. The wheels are also made of lightweight carbon fibre.
The secret behind the power of Hennessey Venom GT is the 7.0-liter twin turbocharged V8 GM LSX engine, which is designed to boast of aluminium heads with two precision ball-bearing turbochargers set on an iron block. As mentioned earlier, the Venom GT has a 1,244 bhp power output, with a 1:1 ratio to its weight in kilograms. The Hennessey Venom GT boasts of adjustable power settings; you can choose to produce 800 bhp, 1,000 bhp, and 1,200 bhp. This beauty also comes with a Ricardo six-speed manual transmission, and can go up to 278 miles per hour.
The Hennessey Venom GT set a Guinness World Record on January 21, 2013 for being the fastest production car. The Venom GT went from zero to 300 kilometres per hour, in under fourteen seconds. The Venom GT has also outperformed the Koenigsegg Agera R by going from zero to two hundred miles per hour in just 14.51 seconds, making it the fastest accelerating car in the whole world.
In April of the same year, The Hennessey Venom GT set another record for itself, by lapping a two-mile course with speeds of 265.7 miles per hour. This test was performed in the United States Naval Air Station in Lemoore California, with VBOX officials certifying the numbers their 3i instruments have logged.
Hennessey Performance set to break another record with the Venom GT: it should be the world’s fastest production car. On February 2014, the Hennessey Venom GT clocked in top speeds of 270.49 miles per hour at the shuttle landing strip of the Kennedy Space Centre. While they have successfully broken the speed record, the Texas-based manufacturer has to build more Venom GT units to qualify. The production car category means that there should be at least thirty in production, and so far, the Venom GT only has sixteen.
